I have a "rescued" male green anole that has trouble putting on weight, among other things. When I got him at Pet Smart, he was severely malnourished and a dull shade of brown. He seemed otherwise fine, and was very entergetic, so I figured I could get him back to normal weight within a month and perhaps breed him after a few more months, but I doubt that will happen any time soon. He settled in fine with my other green anoles, all female, but doesn’t seem interested in them and mostly stays away from them. Within the last month or so, he put on a little weight (his tail isn’t nearly as bony as it was before; his front legs aren’t quite as sinewy now, either), but still seems underweight. I usually let him eat as much as he wants, and he eats several crickets every few days. I don’t think the food is the problem, since the crickets I raise keep the females in good condition. Vitimins are fed approximately every week and water is misted on an average of twice a day.
He spends an unusual amount of time under the heat lamp each day. The temperature where he is is probably around 90-100 degrees F, while the rest of the cage is around 80 degrees F. Other lizards I have kept generally spend an hour or so basking per day, but definitely not all day. He also is usually a light brown, only turning green when he is asleep, taken out of the cage, or when the heat lamp is turned off.
There are several problems I have noticed with him: he is somewhat underweight, drinks more frequently, has some snout scales rubbed off (PetSmart kept him in a ten gallon cage so he was probably rubbing his snout against the side; I didn’t notice this until we got home. He is now in a thirty gallon tank with 2-3 accompanying females), has a very dull colored dewlap, and may have an injury on is front leg.
He is very tame and will eat crickets (and occasionally tidbits of other meat) from my hand and acts perfectly normal, but then again, animals usually hide any illness they have. I would like to hear your opinions on this, even though he doesn’t in any immediate danger.

It’s a big pain to enter photos on my device, so I will send links, instead (through DeviantArt’s sta.sh):

I had rescues with similar problems soooo get some regular neosporin and use it on the mouth problem and makes sure he don’t eat it. Get some other insects and waxworms are good for boosting weight but don’t give too much its like crack for lizards they get addicted refuses other food and it messes up their health. Also dubia roaches are better than crickets and more nutritious so I would stack up on some small ones and gets some adults to breed and start a colony, their also less smelly and noisy than crickets and way easier to care for/breed. Take a fresh stool sample to a herp vet to check for parasites. Not to mention why’d you put this male with your females? Your unsure of his health with can jeopardize your healthy females. Not only him but the others should be getting calcium dusted insects(low phosphorus).

Thank you! Neosporin would probably be good for that spot on his leg, but he always licks off stuff on his mouth, so I’m not sure how I would get him not to eat it... It does seem to stop infection well, though (I once put Neosporin on an anole’s tail that was broken off right behind his legs- it healed without a trace of infection). Unfortunately, my mom won’t let me keep any roaches and they seem to be illegal to buy/sell here, but I might be able to feed him some waxworms. I occasionally feed them moths and dragonflies when I can find them, but about 95% of their diet is cricket, fed on one of the commercial cricket diet with a carrot for moisture (I heard that the cricket calcium gel made their shells too thick to shed, killing them). Is there anything else nutritious the crickets could eat that wouldn’t spoil easily? Everyone gets calcium and vitamin dusted (no phosphorus added) insects about every third time I feed them. I kept the male separate from the females until it seemed he wasn’t diseased, but when I searched up some pictures of green anoles, it occurred to me that he was too skinny... By that point they had already been together for a few weeks, so it seems whatever may be wrong with him is non-commutable. I will keep the separation idea in mind next time I get lizards. (But I’m not going to buy any more lizards from pet stores- they are wild-caught, anyway, and those kept captive in those pet stores clearly aren’t in top shape... I guess I’ll just have to catch lizards somewhere else the next time all the green anoles leave the backyard, since the wild-caught ones generally seem healthy...) I’m going to get a scale with precision of 0.01 grams soon, so that will probably be quite useful for determining what I should expect him to eat to gain weight.

Thank you! I took away one of the female lizards and moved my male to a butterfly net/cage with full spectrum lighting beside it and he seems pretty good now (I’ll probably put the net outside when the weather gets warm). I think the issue was possibly a combination of stress from that one lizard and lighting problems (in staying away from the one lizard he sayed on the other side of the cage under the basking light, where the full spectrum light didn’t quite reach), plus the low weight to begin with. He doesn’t seem so emaciated now, though his ribs still stick out a bit. It doesn’t seem like his leg is injured anymore, either, though it doesn’t look like the scraped nose is ever going away.